All Mediterranean cultures developed through time a dogma against debt. Felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb: "Happy is he who owes nothing." Grandmothers who survived the Great Depression would have advised the exact opposite of debt: redundancy; they would urge us to have...
First, Mother Nature likes redundancies, three different types of redundancies. The first, the simplest to understand, is defensive redundancy, the insurance type of redundancy that allows you to survive under adversity, thanks to the availability of spare parts. Look at the human body. We have two...
Not all the chapters of Cardano’s book treat technical issues. For instance, chapter 26 is titled “Do Those Who Teach Well Also Play Well?” (he concludes, “It seems to be a different thing to know and to execute”). Chapter 29 is called “On the Character of Players”...
In the years leading up to 1576, an oddly attired old man could be found roving with a strange, irregular gait up and down the streets of Rome, shouting occasionally to no one in particular and being listened to by no one at all. He...
The jellyfish of the kind Turritopsis nutricula seems to be the only animal that has discovered the secret of eternal youth.This jellyfish has the ability to pass from the mature adult stage to the immature stage of the polypus and again from the beginning.Thus, basically,...
If it is easy to fall victim to expectations, it is also easy to exploit them. That is why struggling people in Hollywood work hard to look as though they are not struggling, why doctors wear white coats and place all manner of certificates and...
The actor’s name is Bruce Willis, and while he was in Los Angeles, an agent suggested he go on a few television auditions. One was for a show in its final stages of casting. The producers already had a list of finalists in mind, but...
People systematically fail to see the role of chance in the success of ventures and in the success of people. We afford automatic respect to superstar business moguls, politicians, and actors and to anyone flying around in a private jet, as if their accomplishments must reflect...
In 1814, near the height of the great successes of Newtonian physics, Pierre-Simon de Laplace wrote: If an intelligence, at a given instant, knew all the forces that animate nature and the position of each constituent being; if, moreover, this intelligence were sufficiently great to submit...
Relativity showed that we lived in a stranger, more complex universe where space and time were no longer fixed, but could be stretched by mass and motion. This was a universe of black holes and warped space-time that seemed to have little in common with...
